CH. ii THE CASTLE 97

laughing demand for silence. None had heard her enter;
Ballater and van Leyden were close upon their map; like
a child she would surprise them. For an instant, while she
hung above him, he was admitted to conspiracy with her,
and her hands, warm from their gloves, communicated
with a firm pressure her urgent secrecy—communicated to
him, yielded to him, a light, exquisite, eager confidence.
It was as if she had poured her own youth into him, as if,
by her failure to perceive that rigidity of his mind which,
he had supposed, separated him from her, she had given
him her own suppleness, admitting him by a recognition
of kinship with herself to a life that he had believed to be
dead.

For a moment, having no thought but of wonder and
pleasure, he did not attempt to rise, and, when he would
have risen, she held him in his place, moving her head and
smiling. "Don't let them know yet that I am here," she
seemed to say. Indeed, her lips moved as though she were
whispering, but no sound came from them, and Lewis,
seeing her face above him and from so unusual an angle,
felt the wings of unreality touch the instant as if, in the
fulness of a dream, he were on the edge of a discovery that
he was dreaming. It was an experience less than thought,
more fragile and elusive than accepted feeling—a gleam
of magic instantly lost; but to him, who had for long be-
lieved himself to be shut out from the lustre of such en-
chantments, it brought an inexpressible delight—the rapt
but momentary ecstasy of one who has imagined in him-
self again the breath of an expectation long since aban-
doned, of an emotion forgotten and put away.

Van Leyden now looked over his shoulder and said
briefly in Dutch: "Just come in?" before turning to the
map again. But the map was gone; Ballater had risen, all
smiles. Soon the three of them were on their feet before
her.

"I've been here ages," she said, "watching! You didn't
know, did you?"

"No," said van Leyden. "But what if we had?"

"What if you had? Nothing, I suppose. Except that I